alive; this
ripped-up paving, bored with funnels; these trees uprooted, split,
scorched, broken like faggots, thrown all ways, pierced by
bullets--look, this pock-marked pestilence, here! Ah, my boy, my boy,
you can't imagine how it is disfigured, this road!" And he goes
forward, seeing some new amazement at every step.

It is a fantastic road enough, in truth. On both sides of it are
crouching armies, and their missiles have mingled on it for a year and
a half. It is a great disheveled highway, traveled only by bullets and
by ranks and files of shells, that have furrowed and upheaved it,
covered it with the earth of the fields, scooped it and laid bare its
bones. It might be under a curse; it is a way of no color, burned and
old, sinister and awful to see.

"If you'd only known it--how clean and smooth it was!" says Poterloo.
"All sorts of trees were there, and leaves, and colors--like
butterflies; and there was always some one passing on it to give
good-day to some good woman rocking between two baskets, or people
shouting [note 1] to each other in a chaise, with the good wind
ballooning their smocks. Ah, how happy life was once on a time!"

He dives down to the banks of the misty stream that follows the roadway
towards the land of parapets. Stooping, he stops by some faint
swellings of the ground on which crosses are fixed--tombs, recessed at
intervals into the wall of fog, like the Stations of the Cross in a
church.

I call him--we shall never get there at such a funeral pace. Allons!

We come to a wide depression in the land, I in front and Poterloo
lagging behind, his head confused and heavy with thought as he tries in
vain to exchange with inanimate things his glances of recognition. Just
there the road is lower, a fold secretes it from the side towards the
north. On this sheltered ground there is a little traffic.

Along the hazy, filthy, and unwholesome space, where withered grass is
embedded in black mud, there are rows of dead. They are carried there
when the trenches or the plain are cleared during the night. They are
waiting--some of them have waited long--to be taken back to the
cemeteries after dark.

We approach them slowly. They are close against each other, and each
one indicates with arms or legs some different posture of stiffened
agony. There are some with half-moldy faces, the skin rusted, or yellow
with dark spots. Of several the faces are black as tar, the lips hugely
distended--the hea